Gail Barnes is learning more than she thought possible while pursuing her GED diploma at Moreno Valley Community Adult School.

But the 62-year-old doesn’t like the governor’s idea to move adult education courses to community colleges such as Moreno Valley College.

“At college, you have to pay to park,” she said of the campus, where parking is $50 a semester or $5 a day. “I’m coming back to school to get my GED (diploma). I’m retired and cannot afford more fees. I can’t stand in line to get classes.”

Inland school and community college officials also were surprised by Gov. Jerry Brown’s January budget proposal to shift adult education dollars and responsibility from school districts to community colleges. The change could begin July 1 or next school year. The plan’s status may be clearer with Brown’s revised budget in May , or more likely, when the Legislature adopts a budget in June.

Riverside Unified School District leaders were part of a group that met repeatedly with Brown about school funding issues before the January budget proposal, but they never talked about changing adult education, Superintendent Rick Miller and Deputy Superintendent Mike Fine said.

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Inland college officials also say they are unprepared.

“It’s a huge, huge shift,” said Alisa Sparkia Moore, spokeswoman for the San Bernardino Community College District, “especially after all the budget cuts that the community colleges have been through.”

MORE EFFICIENT?

Community colleges’ main mission is teaching adults and the campuses already are authorized to offer adult education classes, Brown wrote in his budget. This makes the state’s system redundant and inefficient, he said. Finally, many California school districts are eliminating their adult schools, Brown said.

Most Inland school districts still run adult schools. Riverside Community College District, which includes Riverside City, Moreno Valley and Norco colleges, cut many lower-level remedial courses last year because adult schools offered them.

Inland adult schools typically teach classes leading to high school diplomas, General Education Development certificates, English as a second language, and citizenship classes for immigrants. They also offer job skills classes, such as computer applications, and fee-based courses for personal enrichment.

Brown’s proposal encouraged colleges to take advantage of school districts’ adult schools, which have available teachers, who might otherwise be laid off, and classroom space.

Though Brown’s plan didn’t make it through the Assembly Budget Subcommittee on education finance this year, officials in the California Community College Chancellor’s Office and Riverside schools don’t think it’s dead.

“I’m guessing it will be tweaked but not eliminated entirely,” Fine told the Riverside school board April 15.

Paul Feist, vice chancellor of communications for the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, said he expects some changes, such as an extra year for colleges to prepare.

Some Inland school districts, such as Riverside and Moreno Valley, have asked their communities’ colleges if they want to contract out for adult education.

Mt. San Jacinto College’s superintendent/president Roger Schultz has started talking to Hemet and Beaumont school officials about contracting. Schultz plans to meet with other school districts in the college’s area, which stretches from the San Gorgonio Pass to Temecula.

The San Bernardino Community College District is waiting to see what the state will do, Moore said.

CONFUSION

In the meantime, several Inland school districts such as Riverside issued preliminary layoff notices to some adult school teachers in case they no longer offer adult education.

The districts may know more when the governor revises his budget proposal in May, but Inland leaders said they don’t expect a final answer until the Legislature adopts the 2013-14 budget in late June.

Community college leaders also are concerned about adult education funding in Brown’s plan.

Riverside Community College District Chancellor Gregory Gray told his board in March that the governor had proposed more than $300 million next year for colleges across the state to teach adult education. The issue, he said, is that school districts had been getting $1 billion a year for the task.

However, no one really knows how much California schools have been spending on adult education the past couple of years.

To help school districts cope with the budget crisis in 2009, the state released restrictions on how school districts spent some funds. Statewide, school districts educated more than 1.2 adults in 2008-09, but then the state stopped keeping data on adult schools.

School districts rolled money for adult education into their general funds, which are used for most teachers’ salaries and daily operations. Many spend little, if any, money from that pot on their adult schools.

For example, the Moreno Valley school board directed its adult school to become self-sustaining to preserve resources for younger students, Assistant Superintendent Martinrex Kedziora said.

Moreno Valley Community Adult School receives some state and federal grants for workforce training but relies primarily on student fees, which range from $30 to $60 a semester, depending how often a class meets, Principal Dulce Leyva-Hall said.

Whether adult students are better served at colleges or small adult schools run by school districts is a complex issue, she said.

“There’s no cookie-cutter solution to address the needs of adults,” Leyva-Hall said.

Follow Dayna Straehley on Twitter: @dstraehley_PE and watch for her posts on the Inland Schools blog: http://blog.pe.com/schools/